Thanks Mike, I'll give this a try.
I've noticed that anyone can make a Block Allocation request. Can this be
limited so that only those within a particular group (faculty) can make the
request?

Kelly
From: "Waldron, Michael H"
<mwald...@email.unc.edu<mailto:mwald...@email.unc.edu>>
Reply-To: "vcl-user@incubator.apache.org<mailto:vcl-user@incubator.apache.org>"
<vcl-user@incubator.apache.org<mailto:vcl-user@incubator.apache.org>>
Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2011 18:23:56 +0000
To: "vcl-user@incubator.apache.org<mailto:vcl-user@incubator.apache.org>"
<vcl-user@incubator.apache.org<mailto:vcl-user@incubator.apache.org>>
Subject: RE: Block Allocation
Kelly,
Yes, the block allocation is assigned to a user group, so the students must
belong to that group. In order for the students to be assigned to the group,
their accounts must already exist in the database.
Rather than wait for the students to login to the VCL, what I do is have the
faculty member send me a list of student ids for the class. I'll run a quick
check to see if any are not already in the database. For ones that aren't, I
run a script that inserts them into the database.
I create a file of the format:
userid firstname lastname emailaddress
Then I feed this to a script which runs the insert:
echo "insert into user (unityid, affiliationid, firstname, lastname, email,
emailnotices,\
lastupdated) values ('$1', 2, '$2', '$3', '$4', 1, now());" | mysql vcl
To easily add the users to a group for the block allocation, I use a neat
script called managegroups.py provided on the VCL site at
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/VCL/managegroups.py+-+Remotely+managing+user+groups
.
Again, this can take a file as input, with the format:
userid@affiliation
So I run a command like:
managegroups.py addUsersToGroup -n myclassgroup -a Local -f myclasslist
The Block Allocation menu is a recently added feature which I think makes it a
lot easier now for faculty to request block allocations. They can fill in the
form which provides all the necessary information to setup the request, and by
simply clicking accept, the block request is actually created, I no longer have
to do that separately. There are also nice statistics for the admin both on the
Block Allocations page and the Dashboard to view whether there were any
failures in provisioning the machines for the request, and how many are
actually being used.
I hope this helps.
Mike Waldron
Systems Specialist
ITS Research Computing
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
CB #3420, ITS Manning, Rm 2509
919-962-9778
________________________________
From: Kelly Patrice Robinson [krobinso...@gsu.edu<mailto:krobinso...@gsu.edu>]
Sent: Friday, August 19, 2011 9:55 AM
To: vcl-user@incubator.apache.org<mailto:vcl-user@incubator.apache.org>
Subject: Block Allocation
Is there documentation on how the Block Allocation works? I've been searching
the Apache site and haven't been able to find anything that describes the
process. If a faculty member (or any user) wants to use block allocation will
they need to create a user group and assign their students to that particular
group in order to allow access to the images that are part of the reservation?
If this is the case, does this mean that the students will need to login first,
before the faculty member can assign them to their group?
Kelly
Georgia State University